only had the corporeal aspect been retained, but even the customary
raiment.

THE SOUL. The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future life
and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the sinful, were
far more vivid than those of their pagan predecessors, accepted and
intensified these ancient ideas. They did not doubt that in the world
to come they should meet their friends, and hold converse with them, as
they had done here upon earth--an expectation that gives consolation to
the human heart, reconciling it to the most sorrowful bereavements, and
restoring to it its dead.

In the uncertainty as to what becomes of the soul in the interval
between its separation from the body and the judgment-day, many
different opinions were held. Some thought that it hovered over the
grave, some that it wandered disconsolate through the air. In the
popular belief, St. Peter sat as a door-keeper at the gate of heaven. To
him it had been given to bind or to loose. He admitted or excluded the
Spirits of men at his pleasure. Many persons, however, were disposed to
deny him this power, since his decisions would be anticipatory of the
judgment-day, which would thus be rendered needless. After the time
of Gregory the Great, the doctrine of purgatory met with general
acceptance. A resting-place was provided for departed spirits.

That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt
their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries,
a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the
intelligent. A pleasing terror gathers round the winter's-evening
fireside at the stories of apparitions, goblins, ghosts. In the old
times the Romans had their lares, or spirits of those who had led
virtuous lives; their larvae or lemures, the spirits of the wicked;
their manes, the spirits of those of whom the merits were doubtful. If
human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body
of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as
extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of any thing
whatever, that these shades of the dead congregate near tombstones,
or take up their secret abode in the gloomy chambers of dilapidated
castles, or walk by moonlight in moody solitude.

ASIATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEWS. While these opinions have universally found
popular acceptance in Europe, others of a very different nature have
prevailed extensively in A